A new plan by the City University of New York to institute a separate category for “White / Jewish” faculty members has raised the ire of some CUNY professors. A report on CUNY’s Diversity Action Plan, recently released by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, laid out the proposed innovation as a means of increasing the inclusion and recruitment of minority groups.

While the university system claims that “some faculty” are in favor of the label, to help them stand out from white instructors in general, a number of CUNY professors have expressed their outrage. “This is, as far as I know, the first time a religion has been introduced into any affirmative action document,” said David Gordon, a history professor at Bronx Community College and the Graduate Center. “What would the response be to a category ‘White/Methodist?’ Silly? Irrelevant?”

Hershey Friedman, deputy chairman of the Finance and Business Management Department at Brooklyn College, was similarly upset. “It’s an insult and idiotic,” he fumed. “Most Jews are brown-skinned. We also have black Jews and Asian Jews. Once you mix religion with race you’re opening a Pandora’s Box — and you look stupid.”

The new ethnic category was decided upon after a steering committee directed by Joyce Moy, director of CUNY’s Asian Research Institute, ran a series of faculty focus groups based on “identity.” The groups included “African-American/black, Asian, White/Jewish, LGBT, Hispanic/Latino, Individuals with disabilities, and Italian-American.” According to Michael Arena, a spokesman for the City University of New York, “In addition to a group organized for white faculty, some faculty expressed a strong affinity and need for a focus group comprised of Jewish faculty members. Such a group was assembled, and it contributed to the effort of gathering facts and opinions from a wide cross-section of groups at CUNY campuses.”

The backlash has come from Jewish professors who believe the new designation may even be harmful to their presence on New York campuses, in the event that Jews are discovered to be “overrepresented.” In the words of one Jewish professor at Kingsborough Community College, “White is in every way a detriment to be categorized, because of the push to hire minorities.” And adopting an extremely satirical tone, an Irish-Catholic Lehman College instructor cracked, “I can get yellow stars to put on my colleagues’ arms,” an obvious reference to the badges that Jews were ordered to don in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The CUNY report, “Building on a Strong Foundation,” cites “positive changes in the gender, ethnic and racial composition of the faculty,” with several minority groups increasing their ranks over a two-decade period. According to the report, whites made up 61.8 percent of the system’s full-time faculty in 2010, down from 73.6 percent in 1990. Blacks constitute 12.7 percent of CUNY’s faculty, a slight increase from 11.6 percent, while Asians shot up from 4.2 percent to 10.6 percent.

The CUNY report further noted that, among all of the university system’s students over the two decades that were surveyed, whites fell from 39.3 percent to 30.1 percent, but blacks also dropped from 29.8 percent to 25.4 percent. The number of Hispanic students noticeably increased from 20.1 percent to 27.1 percent, and Asians went up from 10.6 percent to 17.1 percent. The report does not include any numbers regarding Jewish faculty or students.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who just this past week declared that the New York State Attorney General should investigate complaints of anti-Semitism within the hiring process of faculty at Brooklyn College, described the new Jewish category as “abhorrent.” 

“I think it goes to the idea of, ‘We have enough of this group, let’s get more of that group,’ ” Hikind said. “Diversity is a wonderful thing, but I think the university should hire the best and most qualified educators. If that means all professors are Asian, so be it.”